Respected Hunter artist committed to preserving indigenous culture

Mahoney is a master artist and craftsman. Dedicated to preserving and passing on the indigenous traditions of canoe-making and possum skin cloak creation, he has two bark canoes and a possum skin cloak in a new new exhibition My Country, which opened this week at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

Mahoney created two bark canoes, a red gum canoe and a river reed canoe, and was guided through proper cultural processes and protocols by Barkindji artist David Doyle, including learning collecting bark for the canoe and healing the tree with mud.

"I'm starting to realise it's the first kind of major career stepping stone for me," Mahoney was saying in an interview this week. "It's been surreal, honestly. Really surreal."

Mahoney is a full-time artist. He made his first possum skin cloak when he was 16, and has made dozens since then.

He's made eight river reed canoes.

"I just do art," he says. "I generally work with possum skin cloakmaking and I do workshops around the country. I go out and meet with community members and help them tell their stories on cloaks. I also do other workshops making canoes and doing public art installations, stuff like that."

The river reed canoes were traditionally made for traversing lake systems and rivers.

"They are designed to be made quickly, bundled together, used to travel across waterways and then left on the banks to decompose," Mahoney says.

The red gum canoes have a longer life, but are still significant.

"They all have their life to them," Mahoney says. "They use them, and they go back into country. Everything we do is very much like that."

The possum skin cloaks are also of great cultural significance.

"A cloak being mended over its lifespan will last as long as the owner," Mahoney says "Some cloaks are made at the beginning of someone's life and kept for the duration of their life, mended along the way, and then actually buried with them afterwards."

Mahoney learned the art and craft of making the cloaks from his aunty Maree Clarke. "She was very involved early on when the revitalisation of possum skin cloaks was happening throughout the country," he says.

"She was one of the people who got to learn the practice and help other people relearn that practice. That was something as a kid I would go along to, workshops, meeting with community members and that kind of stuff. Since I turned 16 I started making possum skin cloaks."

The cloaks are made from 25 to 35 possum skins (always brushtail possums) sewn together. Just as important as the fur side (which is waterproof and hold warmth) is the skin side, where a family's story is told.

"The first one I made was for myself," Mahoney says. "It was my family cloak and it told the story of where we grew up and our different lineage and had all the handprints of my family on it. And I keep it with me today."

Once the skins are sewn together, the maker sits down with the family or family member, and they talk through the design, which is a family's story. It's sketched out, then made with a pyrography tool burning the design into the animal skin and then painted, with natural ochre colours.

Mahoney has always made his own colours, gathering the material from country.

Possum skin cloaks are not available commercially.

"They are only to be made for indigenous people or by indigenous people. They are not something we make lightly," Mahoney says. "Outside of the sale for community members (indigenous), the only places that purchase them are educational institutions, like the NGV."

We don't tend to ever sell them in the private market to individual collectors because of their cultural significance."